This new book advertised on Breitbart Bullies: How the Left's Culture of Fear and Intimidation Silence America by Ben Shapiro looks very interesting and I think I'll buy it.
It captures what I have long felt about the incessant and nasty brow-beating of the "progressives" especially on Twitter (although Libertarians can be as nasty and incessant as I've come to discover).
Doesn't this seem familiar:
The left’s goal is to shut down the political debate by decrying their opponents as victimizers. They label their opponents racist, sexist, bigoted, homophobic, benighted, backwards bitter clingers. They liken them to Nazis, KKK members, terrorists. Then they cast them out like lepers from the political debate. Because who would bother debating a Nazi, or a KKK member, or a terrorist?
This is how the left wins arguments....
We are no longer E Pluribus Unum. Disagree with President Obama? That’s because you hate black people. (Want to ignore 14% black unemployment, though, and you’re a hero to the left.)
Think that increasing taxes on high income earners stifles economic growth? That’s because you despise the poor. (If you don’t care about rising poverty rates under big government, though, your heart obviously bleeds for the homeless urchins.)
Believe that an unborn child has a right to life? That’s because you hate women. (Ignore sex-selective abortion, however, and you’re a visionary for gender equality.)
Like traditional marriage? You hate gays and would have strung up Matthew Shepard on a fence. (Blackball Proposition 8 supporters from work, though, and you’re an advocate of freedom.)
Not only are you vilified if you disagree with any of the politically-correct lines on these and other issues; if you know of a related issue that you would think people who seem to care about human rights would care about, i.e. black unemployment or infanticide of female babies, you will discover only silence from the PC ones because they don't want to be seen as allied with the right.
In fact, you suspect that it is fear that drives the bullies of the left -- fear of not belonging, and being vilified by their own, if they don't pass muster on the "line".
Says Shapiro:
This is not only how the left wins arguments. It’s how they win elections. They don’t win by offering more convincing policy proposals based on evidence. They win by impugning the motives of their political opposition. Exit polls in 2012 showed that Americans liked Mitt Romney better than Barack Obama on the issues. They liked him better on his vision for the country. But there is one area in which they hammered him: they thought he didn’t have anything in common with them. They thought he was a bad guy. That’s because everything the left did during this election cycle was geared toward bullying Romney. He wanted to fire employees just to watch their wives die of cancer. He wanted to force gay kids into dying broken and sad. He was a racist engaged in “n***erization” of Obama. He was a sexist waging a “war on women” using binders.
Well, exactly. All true. All Saul Alinsky methods.
But then as so often happens for me when I read Breitbart (and I almost cancel it every week because it has gotten worse since Breitbart himself died), there is something completely jarring for me, like this:
After all, when someone stands up to a bully – say, Israel standing up to Islamic terrorists, or even George Zimmerman standing up to a young bully pounding his head into the pavement – the left goes berserk.
No, it's not about Israel standing up to Islamic terrorists -- I'm all for that.
It's the characterization of Zimmerman as "standing up to a young bully" when it seems in the story of Trayvon Martin, Zimmerman is the bully, and Martin is the victim. Of course, this case hasn't come to trial yet, but has been endlessly played out online everywhere and tried and re-tried. Naturally the usual suspects like the Wrong Rev. Al Sharpton have made much hay over this story.
But from everything we know at this point, it does seem as if George Zimmerman not only used excessive force, he just didn't have any business roaming around with a gun like that.
He has a history of run-ins with the law where he was accused of violence - by his ex-fiance who took out an order of protection against him (and in the current fashion, he took one out against her). The police told him not to follow the suspect and to leave it to them to handle, but he disobeyed them.
The context is one of black crime -- the kind of black crime that liberals always deny or become very evasive about. There were a half dozen robberies in this gated community that was mixed white/Hispanic/black/Asian. In fact blacks could be victims of their fellow blacks in this setting. The robberies were known to be committed by blacks because they were caught on tape or arrested later with the stolen goods. So that was the setting in which this hyped-up vigilante George Zimmerman was acting.
Obviously, there are parts of the story that don't add up. The supporters of Trayvon say he was just running across a lawn in the rain to get back to a football game on TV after buying some Skittles. It's the Skittles that clinches it for many people.
But George Zimmerman himself was somehow injured and shows off his injuries to the press as proof that he was the one bullied -- although he was the one who got in Trayvon's face merely because he was running across a lawn -- he had no weapons or stolen goods on him.
And the reason this story doesn't work as a "bully" story for me, and why I don't get all "2nd amendment" on this one is because I fail to see why the police cannot handle incidents involving suspicion of theft. Zimmerman was not a hired and paid and trained security guard; he was a voluntary patrolman who seems to have been chosen by his neighbours for the job merely because he showed up and said he would do it. Because a perp got away one time, this overkill -- having a guy patrol the area with a gun, even if legal -- was somehow justified. I'm not seeing that it is. I don't think the "stand your ground" concept should apply to self-appointed agents of justice in public areas pursuing suspects on other people's property. It's not like Trayvon was an intruder inside a home; he was running across a public area, even if that did include people's lawns. So it just doesn't wash for me.
Then there's the effort to discredit Trayvon in this story with his own past. But here, you can only ask why the school system engages in such overkill. The entire idea of suspension from school for offenses in school is one of the most absurd things these systems come up with (we have the same thing in New York). So a kid commits an offense in school and the solution is...to leave him roaming around the city for 10 days, getting into worse trouble?!
His offenses just don't seem to warrant this 10 days -- the first offense is merely being late -- that should merely go on his record. The second was graffiti -- there, he should have been held after school to clean it up in after-school detention. The third was more serious -- possession of a marijuana pipe -- but the police didn't have grounds for a arrest so the school should have sentenced him to detention and some kind of social work/drug program. Suspension is stupid. None of his crimes were violent ones against other persons.
I imagine I will agree with the findings of Shapiro on other public bullies -- Sandra Fluke, for example. There is no reason in hell for her to make the Jesuits pay for her birth control. She can go down the street and go to Planned Parenthood, which has had a banner year for state funding and an all-time high in abortions performed.
I find Dan Savage entirely loathsome -- not because he's gay or promotes BDSM -- I read his column like any other New York liberal and that's not the issue. It's because again, he is savage to others as a means of promoting his own rights -- what he did to Rick Santorum is utterly despicable and that is why he has ZERO credibility with me. He represents some of the worst of violent gay male culture that I fail to see why we have to accept in accepting gay rights, which I support. We don't. The reviewer on Amazon claims that he never yelled at the Christian teenagers, but I'd like a second opinion.
In any event, Breitbart continually disappoints. I find stories about things I know about with mistakes in them, stupid mistakes. I find tendentious crap the way the left has tendentious crap. I find stuff that is thin, blow out of proportion just to fill the day's news gap. You click and go to the story and then say "meh". You feel it should be a weekly instead of a daily for that reason, but that isn't possible in today's 24/7 media world...
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